John F. Kennedy on War & Peace

1961: U2 spy planes spotted offensive missile sites in Cuba

A U2 spy plane captured images of a missile site in Cuba. The discovery became public when Pres. Kennedy addressed the nation: "Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in
preparation on that imprisoned island," he said.

Commercial air travel to Cuba was suspended. The world was on the brink of nuclear war for another 6 days, until Soviet premier Nikita Krushchev announced that the missiles would be removed.

Commanding PT-59 in WWII, sank three Japanese barges

New PT boats were being fitted out with heavier guns, and he wanted command of one. He got the 1st gunboat, PT-59. His crew were all volunteers, 5 of them from PT-109. His new executive officer later said that "what impressed me most.was that so many of
the men that had been on PT-109 had followed him to the 59. It spoke well of him as a leader."

Kennedy had 6 weeks of action on PT-59, on one occasion sinking 3 Japanese barges.
Finally, he was no longer able to walk without the aid not only of a back brace but of a cane as well, he was terribly thin, and his stomach pain had become so intense that he had to see Navy doctors, who found "a definite ulcer crater."
X-rays of his back found a chronic disk disease that had obviously been aggravated by the pounding inflicted in the boats. Shipped home, he had his back operated on in June 1944.

1962: Rejected faking Gitmo attack as war pretext with Cuba

The American military had planned fake terrorist attacks on our own citizenry at Guantanamo. Operation Northwoods was approved in 1962 for action against Cuba.

Here was the background: At a White House meeting in Feb. 1962, when various covert action
plans seemed to be going nowhere, Robert Kennedy ordered a stop to all such anti-Castro efforts. The Joint Chiefs decided the only option was to trick the American public and world opinion into a justifiable war.

When the document was presented that
March, JFK [concluded] that there was virtually no possibility of our using overt force to take Cuba. So operation Northwoods remained secret for 35 years.

It seems that all through history, wars and takeovers are started with false flag operations:
the Reichstag fire, the Chinese supposedly attacking Japan, the Gulf of Tonkin incident with Vietnam. The list goes on and on. History has a way of repeating itself, like that old cliche: if it works once, let's try it again.

1963: Planned to remove all troops from Vietnam by 1965

Vietnam was a sham from the get-go, trumped up by the military industrial complex. If President Kennedy had lived, we'd have started withdrawing troops by late 1963 and had all our servicemen out of there by the end of 1965. The idea that
JFK was responsible for having escalated the war is simply bogus. It's obvious his plans were to pull us out, but he'd said behind the scenes he had to wait until after the next election to do it.

When the Joint Chiefs of Staff
(JCS) official file from those years was declassified in 1997, it contained a memorandum of conference on May 6, 1963. That one and a follow-up memo from late October (less than a month before JFK was assassinated) clearly show we were starting to get
out of Vietnam and leave matters in the hands of the South Vietnamese, where they belonged. Unfortunately, this is again a case of misleading the people for years, by keeping the true thoughts of John F. Kennedy out of the public realm.

1940: best-seller, "Why England Slept"

Jack was fearless enough to tear around Europe in his own convertible in 1937; and, amid the tensions of 1939, to explore the Soviet Union, the Balkan countries, parts of the Middle East, Czechoslovakia, and Germany, returning to London on
September 1, the day Germany invaded Poland. The book that resulted from these travels--an expansion of his Harvard senior honors thesis and titled "Why England Slept"--was published in 1940 and became a best-seller.

Source: True Compass, by Edward M. Kennedy, p. 24
, Sep 14, 2009

1943: PT-109 rammed; crew rescued from South Pacific

In 1943, Jack got himself assigned as commander of a patrol torpedo boat. PTs were small, often badly built, lightly armed craft deployed to prowl combat-zone waters at night in search of Japanese destroyers and cruisers.

On Aug. 2, as part of a squad
of 15 such craft sent to intercept a Japanese convoy, PT 109 was rammed by an enemy destroyer and sliced in half. Two of the 13-man crew were killed. My brother exhorted the survivors to swim toward a flyspeck island, personally towing the badly burned
engineer for 5 hours by clamping the man's lifeboat straps in his mouth. Jack then swam back out into the ocean to try and signal a passing boat. Unsuccessful, he swam back to his men half unconscious. The ordeal continued for a week, with Jack directing
swims to larger islands. On Aug. 9, the party made contact via a message Jack had scraped into a coconut shell. (That coconut is now in the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston.) The message made it to an American base, which sent a PT to rescue the men.

1961: Accepted sole responsibility for Bay of Pigs disaster

In 1960, one year after Fidel Castro had overthrown the corrupt dictator Fulgencio Batista, Cuba began shipping millions of tons of its most lucrative crop, sugar, to the Soviet Union in return for oil and grain. In May, Cuba established diplomatic
relations with the Soviet Union.

Each of these moves accelerated the collision course of Castro's regime with American security interests. Eisenhower had approved a CIA-drafted paper, "A Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime" [which Jack
inherited].

Jack, feeling his way through the opening weeks of his presidency, grew skeptical of the ever more ambitious and complex Cuba invasion plan: defections from Castro's army would follow; the population would rise up to embrace the invaders;
and the hated regime would be ousted with minimal casualties. As history shows, the invasion was a failure.

On April 21, Pres. Kennedy stepped before the microphones at a press conference and accepted sole responsibility for the Bay of Pigs disaster.

OpEd: Vietnam war restored the French colonial empire

Enthused over the Green Berets, JFK dispatched them to Vietnam where the US was supporting the restoration of the French colonial empire. In that inglorious adventure, more than 50,000 soldiers lost their lives, the US squandered no less than $500
billion, killed millions of Vietnamese and expanded the solidarity with that poor Third World country. Conscripts had to be replaced with professional soldiers, separating the people from military training and thus weakening the nation.

Source: Obama and the Empire, by Fidel Castro, p. 55
, Apr 15, 2009

1960s: Increased US troops in Vietnam from 900 to 16,000

In 1962, Vietnam had not yet become a hot discussion topic; after all, when Kennedy had been elected in November 1960, only 900 US military personnel were stationed in Vietnam. By 1963, there were some 16,000 American troops there.

On May 11, 1961, President Kennedy had issued National Security Administration Memo 52, committing the US to the prevention of the Communist domination of South Vietnam.
The President increased the number of US personnel, designated an additional $42 million/year in financial support for the government at Ngo Dinh Diem, and approved the CIA's plans to carry out commando raids in North Vietnam.

The Kennedy
administration went on to condone the overthrow of South Vietnamese President Diem, to dispatch the US Army Green Berets to Southeast Asia, and to commit American-manned helicopters and tactical aircraft to help defeat North Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh.

In early 1960s, nobody protested US attacks in Vietnam

The Vietnam War actually began for the US in 1950, and from 1954 to 1960, the US had a kind of Latin American-style terror regime in place. And it wasn't any joke; they killed about 60,000-70,000 people. But there was no protest. Zero. When Kennedy took
over, they escalated it, and pretty soon it became a direct US attack. Still no protest. Through the early 1960s, you couldn't get anybody to sign a petition. By 1966, Vietnam was becoming a big issue. But protests were met with extreme hostility.

Source: Power and Terror, by Noam Chomsky, p. 25
, May 21, 2002

Avoid mistake of WWII by stopping Soviet advance in Europe

Truman called on Congress to stop the Red advance across Europe by approving US military aid to help governments in Greece and Turkey resist left-wing insurgencies. Jack Kennedy thought stopping the Soviet advance in Europe was the only way to avoid
repeating the mistake of not stopping the Nazi advance at the Munich Conference of 1938. Having lived through prewar appeasement and its consequences, the WWII generation had come home from the South Pacific and Europe determined to prevent a sequel
to the tragedy that had interrupted and harrowed their lives and erased so many others. This time, the dictator must be stopped in his tracks. To young men like Kennedy and Nixon, the Yalta conference of February 1945, which divided up postwar Europe,
had the stench of another Munich, another buckling under to an aggressor.

The stop Stalin, Kennedy accepted the mission to seek out and destroy this allies here in the country.

Pouring money into jungles of Indochina is self-destructive

The Democrats had lost China. The Republicans could not afford to lose Indo-China. For the 1st time, however, Kennedy broke with the hard line. "To pour money, material and men into the jungles of Indo-China without at least a remote prospect of victory
would be dangerously futile and self-destructive. I am frankly of the belief that no amount of military assistance in Indo-China can conquer an enemy that is everywhere and at the same time nowhere."

With France's final capitulation, which forced a division in Vietnam between a Communist North and pro-Western South, Jack Kennedy now saw the non-Communist South Vietnamese as a people worthy of American help. "Vietnam represents the cornerstone of
the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone in the arch, the finger in the dike," Kennedy said. "It is our offspring. We cannot abandon it, we cannot ignore its needs."

1962: Supported anti-Diem coup as means to win Vietnam War

Kennedy's Aug. 24 cable read "Diem must be given chance to rid himself of Nhu & his coterie and replace them. If Diem refuses, then we must face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved. We will back you to the hilt on action to achieve our
objectives." Ambassador Lodge took the cable to be a direct presidential order to encourage an anti-Diem coup.

Diem now posed a double jeopardy to Kennedy. He might lose the war to the Communists. Or he might sign a separate peace with Hanoi, making
the US look irrelevant. Kennedy had sized up the predicament. "I can't give a piece of territory to the Communists and then get the American people to reelect me." To ensure plausible deniability, he ordered his people to destroy all records of cable
traffic, starting with the fateful Aug. 24 order.

In a press conference Kennedy made the point: "We want the war to be won, the Communists to be contained, and the Americans to go home. Taken from a Catholic church, Diem and Nhu were shot repeatedly.

Increased anti-guerilla forces; founded the Green Berets

His pride was the Army Special Forces, rapidly growing to a level some five or six times as large as when he took office. The President directed that the Special Forces wear green berets as a mark of distinction.
He wanted them to be a dedicated, high quality elite corps of specialists, trained to train local partisans in guerilla warfare, prepared to perform a wide range of civilian as well as military tasks.
He personally supervised the selection of new equipment--the replacement of boots with sneakers for example. "The new anti-guerilla forces proved one of his most important military contributions.
In South Vietnam, they delivered babies, chopped trails, dug wells, prevented ambushes, raised morale and formed effective bands against the Communist.

Defend Quemoy and Matsu if Communist China attacks Taiwan

NIXON: President Eisenhower was correct in his policy in the Formosa Straits, where he refused to follow the recommendations which Senator Kennedy voted for in 1955; and again made in 1959; recommendations with regard to slicing off a piece of free
territory [the Chinese islands of Quemoy and Matsu], and abandoning it to the Communists.

KENNEDY: Let me try to correct the record on the matter of Quemoy and Matsu. I voted for the Formosa resolution in 1955. I have sustained it since then.
I agree with the Administration policy to defend Quemoy and Matsu even if the attack on these islands, two miles off the coast of China, were not part of a general attack on Formosa [Taiwan].
I indicated that I would defend those islands if the attack were directed against Formosa, which is part of the Eisenhower policy. I've supported that policy.